My life has totally changed cont. | brandise's Blog

 So, I have about an hour to kill before my next meeting starts and I think that writing this blog entry will help me get my head straight for the meeting. It is a pretty big meeting, even though the outcome is already decided. But I will come back to that.
 

After my grandma had her heart attack and was incapacitated with no clear time when she would come through it her advance directive and legal wishes kicked into gear. That's when I found out she had designated me her sole heir. I blogged about that whole thing earlier. So I found myself at the center of a lot of people needing decisions. There were documents to process, checks to sign, etc. etc. I was in shock but still tried to do right by my grandma. I sort of dove in and tried to learn fast and always kept the idea to “do what my grandma would have done” top of mind. I prayed it would be temporary and that she would get better, fix her will to spread it around and all would be fine.

That didn't happen. So now my days are pretty much filled with was my grandma's business which now seems to be mine. I say seems to be but the legal stuff is basically done, the estate is just going through the final stages and in reality it is mine. But it still seems impossible for this to be happening to me. I have had many questions from friend s here about what the business is so I am going to answer that with this blog.

This company started out way back in the day when my grandpa decided to quit his job and start his own business. My dad was still a baby then so it was way before me. He and my grandma had been working lots of different jobs to save money to do this. My grandpa worked full time as a construction foreman and worked in a liquor store at night. He also did side work for other construction companies. My grandma took in laundry, watched neighbor kids, and even cleaned houses. She had been educated as a bookkeeper and she also worked for a couple of small companies to keep their books.

When they started, they began by buying some land, and my grandpa built a warehouse on it. When it didn't sell they began to lease space in it and soon figured out they could make more money by doing that than they would have by selling it. My grandma came up with the formula and I won't bore you with details, but basically it was all about keeping debt down to almost nothing and then renting, leasing and using tax law to build up more money for the next project. Grandpa did the actual construction, grandma found the deals and managed the office.

By the time I came along the business was very successful and employed my dad and my uncle and a few other cousins and lots of people who became like family to my grandparents. Then my grandpa was killed in an accident. Grandma stepped up and kept things going with the help of her sons and the people in the company. And yes she decided to leverage my grandpa's insurance to help the business grow instead of retiring and living off of the insurance. She changed the nature of the business and started to acquire other businesses. It started with sub-contractors and other companies that her company needed as suppliers etc. But then she discovered just had a knack for locating businesses that could be successful but were being poorly managed. And she liked it.

So she would buy a company, get it straightened out and get the income etc to do the next deal. This company has become a company that does that kind of thing as its major activity. Absorb, correct and the manage the new acquisitions.

Then there was the family blow up. My mom had been pressing my dad to get out on his own anyway so my parents decided to move to southern Washington State and have a new start. My grandma gave my dad his “inheritance” to get started and wrote him out of the will. My uncle was a different story, but let's just say that he ended up out of the will too. Since I was first adopted by my parents, my grandma and I were very close. And for her own reasons she decided to make me her heir.

So what I inherited was this jumble of companies she had purchased and ran for years. She also had two very large deals pending that significantly added to the business. One of those has already closed, and the other is finalizing today which is the meeting I am waiting for. The deal I already processed was pretty big, but more along the lines of what my grandma's business did. Basically we bought out two partners who had about half the companies and real estate that my company has. The partners just made some bad financial decisions and bought into that whole leverage debt to expand faster thing, which works great until the economy takes a dip and the income won't keep up with the debt load. My grandma had negotiated the price of the company down to the point where the partners exited stage right and got paid for a year while at the same time negotiating with their creditors for a payoff on their debt. We ended up with a small dept burden and a recapitalized group of businesses.
 

The deal today is more scary to me. It is about the same type of thing, just bigger and involving different types of companies. This whole thing is only possible because of the previous deal and my grandma's genius. In a little less than an hour I am going to end up more doubling the size of my current business from the standpoint of number of employees. It is weird because the business I am buying is at a point where if this deal doesn't happen they are in bankruptcy. In reality it is way more than I want, but I also know if I don't do this deal a lot of people will be hurt and a huge opportunity will pass by. So onward and upward LOL.